


Love and Death

by EuterpesChild



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-compliant angst, Gen, Repetition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 21:58:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9348284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EuterpesChild/pseuds/EuterpesChild
Summary: La petite mort (French pronunciation: [la pətit mɔʁ], the little death) is an expression which means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" and in modern usage refers specifically to "the sensation of orgasm as likened to death".Love and death are two constants in life, and sometimes they're one and the same.John Watson is intimately familiar with both.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Technically canon-compliant for series 4 as of January 15, 2017.

Love and death have always been painfully intertwined.

 

“La petite mort” is the easiest example, but of course there are many kinds.

 

The death of a friendship, for instance, doesn’t have to involve a literal death. Perhaps they simply…moved away. Or your interests diverged. Or you realised you’d actually hated every one of their mannerisms for years and you just didn’t have the ability to articulate it. (The last one is especially painful if you thought you loved them.)

 

Then there’s the death of unrequited love. You could fall out of love. The object of your desire could get married to someone else and somehow the rational part of you could stop you loving them so deeply.

 

Then, of course, the most painful combination of loving and dying. To know, to finally find out, that the person you love with the depths of your soul did love you back and you could have had a chance, only for them to stop existing, possibly in front of your very eyes.

 

John Watson was far too familiar with the latter.

 

 

John could easily have survived if Afghanistan was the worst thing to happen to him. Love and death are everyday occurrences when you live in a war zone. Families ripped apart. The deep camaraderie born of facing the reaper together and coming back at the end of the day. Jolts of adrenaline running through your body that make you feel alive and at the point of death simultaneously, and can also feel like your first love.

 

John had a terrible habit of falling in love with the wrong people, and James Sholto was no exception. John Watson was deeply in love with his commander before he was blown up, and never stopped loving him after.

Then there was the kid John was shot saving. He was truly a kid: no more than 20, if even that. John loved him the way some people fall in love with their step-siblings: with a depth of feeling somewhere between romance and falling off a cliff. Then the kid died and John was shot and stitching himself up wrong-handed in the sand and then John was being sent home.

 

John could have survived this. John did survive this, and he could have kept on that way for at least a little while longer, just surviving and making it through and not ever again feeling for a human being that same way.

 

But then there was Sherlock Holmes.

 

 

John Watson had fallen in love before. John Watson had faced death before, too. But nothing was quite so exquisite a combination as William Sherlock Scott Holmes. Sherlock was everything John had ever craved and yet-

 

John loved.

 

John loved with all his heart and all his soul and all his being and he hoped that maybe, just maybe, this time-

 

…Then Sherlock jumped.

 

And once again love and death and the life of John Watson were one and the same and over and again and it hurt more, somehow, this time, than all the loves and all the deaths John had lived before.

 

 

John fell in love again.

Or he said he did.

Blonde hair and short stature can’t quite compare to the giving of life.

 

Mary was nothing like Sherlock, which was essentially the point.

Mary was safe, and alive, and utterly not exciting.

(Utterly not John Watson.)

Mary meant not-quite-love, and Mary meant not-death, and John was ready to live without either.

 

Then Sherlock was alive again, and then Mary was not quite Mary, and then Sherlock was dead again.

John was in love again and alive again, and then the marrow-deep connection of love and death struck and John remembered why poets and scientists swear off love for Sherlock was both and now he was nothing.

 

 

Sherlock Holmes was less dead this time, admittedly, but he had still definitely Been Dead.

 

John Watson said he was less in love this time, but when someone dies for you twice, it’s hard not to love them.

 

John was married.

He thought being shot near the heart might have hurt less.

 

Sherlock tried to die again and this time John was the one to save him. Enough with saving yourself: then what is the point of love?

 

Love can kill death just as surely as death can kill love.

 

 

Sherlock Holmes was dead, and then he wasn’t. Then he was dead, and then he wasn’t. Then he tried to be dead, but he didn’t try hard enough.

 

John Watson was technically alive, but only for short periods, and usually only in Baker Street. His heart wasn’t sure how much more he could take.

 

Love and death and death and love are two sides of the same coin, and neither of them cares how your life is going.

 

John Watson was married and John Watson was in love, but the two are not necessarily related.

 

When Mary died, if Mary died, it was almost a relief. For once in John’s life, death did not mean the end of love. For once, death truly meant freedom.

But then Mary told him over and over after she died how much she had loved him, and death still controlled love, for how can you love someone else when a dead person loved you so much?

How can death and love be so connected and yet so separate?

 

If death is constantly keeping you from love, does love really exist?

 

 

Sherlock Holmes is death and love in a single man. He creates death, then defies it. He is the definition of love in John Watson’s personal dictionary. For Sherlock Holmes, John Watson is life, and for John, Sherlock shapes it. Death kept them apart and kept them apart and love brought them back together, only for love after death to pull them apart again.

 

Death and love and love and death.

 

Forever a dance, never an end in sight.

 

Does one dance forever, or does one simply succumb to the precipice and let death take you for once and for all?

**Author's Note:**

> I was originally gonna try to make this hopeful at the end, but then I remembered that I was the one writing it.


End file.
